And...

Writing About Film

Regarding Boyz N the Hood

Unpublished, 1991note: in a sad attempt at irony on my part, this review
of Regarding
Henry pretends to be about John Singleton's contemporaneous film,
Boys N the Hood...

I'd been teased by trailers for John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood for
months, and I was so excited about seeing it that I took a wrong turn inside
the Cineplex
Odeon and didn’t find my seat until right after the credits had rolled.
It was worth the hassle. The film demonstrates the serious potential of at
least one of today’s influx of hot black filmmakers. Written and directed
by the 23-year-old Singleton, who hails from South Central LA, Boyz is
one of the
cleverest, most courageous critiques of the white American hegemony since Leave
it to Beaver. I expected a shocking, ultra-serious exploration of the
ghettos of black LA; instead I found a biting satire which poignantly highlights
the discrepancy
between urban America’s white and black, rich and poor.

The film’s
action revolves around the violent shooting of corporate lawyer Henry Turner,
played by Harrison Ford, and his long, painful recovery. In the
process, Henry starts his life from scratch, renouncing his fast-track sleazy
lifestyle and rediscovering the love of his wife and child.

The movie effortlessly
spoofs every Reagan-Bush-Spielberg value we have learned in the last ten
years, all the while masquerading as a heartfelt fable in
the tradition of It’s A Wonderful Life. The film’s brilliance
rests in its uncanny appropriation of white-bread cinematic conventions,
from Henry’s
innocent, freckle-faced daughter; to the slobbering family puppy; to the
film’s
limp denouement, as the “reincarnated” Henry quits his law firm
and salvages the life of a destitute cripple he had cheated in the last case
he worked
on before his shooting.

Singleton’s most inspired choice is the character
of Radio Raheem, also known as Bradley. Resurrecting the boombox-toting hoodlum
of Do the Right Thing,
again played by Bill Nunn, Singleton makes a shrewd comment on cinematic
images of black men. Bradley is a 1990s black mammy, a physical therapist
who coaxes
Henry back to the world he was taken from by his shooting. As envisioned
by Singleton and Nunn, Bradley retains not one sliver of genuine black personality
or culture,
embracing every conceivable African American stereotype: he’s burly,
boisterous and semi-articulate; lusts after white women; is constantly jiving
to loud music
on his Walkman; and is a former athlete. Finally — and here I think
Singleton’s
parody almost goes too far — Bradley utilizes an outmoded "soul" handshake
that hasn’t been seen since the late 1970s.

True to the medium he sends
up, Singleton’s direction is polished and completely
without personality; how, as a first-time director, he convinced Paramount
to give him the production budget to carry off this film is a mystery. He
manages
to give the movie a slickness and falsity that only Hollywood at its sappiest
and most corrupt has heretofore achieved, recalling such modern classics
as Ghost, Steel Magnolias, and Home Alone. What
is most surprising is that Paramount gambled
its resources on the movie at all, especially considering the potential damage
this film could inflict on the studio’s other, more traditional, projects.
In its adept mimicry of Hollywood sentimentality, the film pushes repressed
Protestant morés in the audience’s face, illustrating how and
why whites, as this county’s dominant, most fortuitous race, find it
impossible to understand or exist harmoniously with those unlike them.

Singleton
is most brilliant when he shows the white world colliding with that of the
non-white. Henry is assaulted almost as soon he ventures into the foreign,
underground
world of the New York City streets, which are all too close to the cloistered
Fifth Avenue apartment he inhabits. Angry and careless because his Latina
maid forgot to buy his cigarettes, Henry enters a bodega run by a meek and
inscrutable
Arab, and is oblivious to the reality of the gun being pointed at him by
a lurking Latino robber. Singleton shrewdly alludes to the convention so
popular
among
our military elites when the robber blithely shoots Henry in the chest and
head: non-whites just don’t understand the value of human life. This
completely unprovoked act of violence lands Henry in the hospital emergency
room, where
he and his family are forced to momentarily suffer along with the masses
of color. What an inconvenience, and thank God Henry improves (or his medical
benefits
kick in) quickly enough to get him his own room in the hospital.

Annette Bening
brilliantly executes the role of Sarah, Henry’s prissy,
WASP wife (the other characters, including Ford himself, are translated
in the most banal fashion, rendering them one-sided and completely unengaging).
Sarah is a stuck-up shallow socialite who has no capacity for compassion — or
passion of any kind. You can see her mind whirling as she considers the
ramifications of her endangered lifestyle, but she evidences no real feeling
for her husband.
One scene, in which daughter Rachel asks her mom whether they’ll now
be poor, has Sarah feebly denying that possibility while vowing vengeance
on the
source of her daughter’s worries (another girl’s mother), who
has threatened her materialistic honor. Subsequent scenes display Sarah’s
pride and staunch patrician faith, which prevent her from enjoying honest
relationships
with her friends or accepting monetary help from Henry’s old boss.
Another more typical film, one which took itself seriously, would balance
Henry’s
physical reawakening with a corresponding moral inspiration on the part of
Sarah. Instead, the values she represents are continuously reaffirmed. As
Henry recovers,
the sanctity of the nuclear family is restored, they are still able to attend
cocktail parties, and they get to keep their expensive artwork, clothes and
furniture. The film succeeds best in its sendup of these Ken and Barbie figures
as role
models; Sarah and Henry’s interaction — just to pick any two
characters — is
so emotionally crippled that it single-handedly puts the lie to the traditional
Hollywood-represented relationship and its real-life practitioners.

The climactic
rescue of Rachel from the antiseptic surroundings of her boarding school
and the happy trio’s escape to the suburbs is an hilarious spoof
of contemporary America’s “I’m OK, You’re OK” mentality.
Sarah retains her real-estate position and Rachel goes to a local private
school, leaving her friends to stifle in the puritan nunnery she left behind.
As for
Henry? Well, we can be sure that he sets to work on a supermarket best-seller
about his new lease on life. They even say goodbye to their long-time maid,
who, in her heavily-accented English, assures “Meester Henry” that
she likes him better now. With Raheem-Bradley, Rosella the maid, and the
gentle old black waiter at a soirée looking up approvingly, Singleton
scoffs that all it takes to for white people to improve the world is to treat
a
servant as they would a treasured puppy.

The movie’s one overriding
fault is that Singleton does his job too well: I wonder if audiences in America’s
heartland will get the joke. On the other hand, the film is so artificial
and cloying that non-white audiences will
undoubtedly find it unwatchable. Come to think of it, if I didn’t
know better, I almost could believe this was one of those horrible feel-good
movies
in the mold of, say, Mike Nichols’ Working Girl. Whether played
straight or not, however, the film turns out to be a loser; but if it’s
bound to disappear quickly from the marquees, it may as well leave with its
head
held
high. Why does it take brilliant pastiche such as Boyz N The Hood to
enable us to see through the insipid conventions so commonly accepted as
honest
emotion
in American film?